What if architecture could be listened to? At Villa Arconati, Terraforma gave it a try

“Inside a labyrinth, there is a double reason to lose oneself: physically and sonically.” When Donato Dozzy tells me this—a DJ and producer who these days is acting as a special instructor at the Terraforma Radical School—just a few hours before the final showcase, the labyrinth of Villa Arconati is already scattered with spheres designed as sound systems by Daniele Fabris. They barely emerge from the greenery, camouflaged among the hedges restored by Fosbury Architecture as part of the collaboration between Terraforma and the Fondazione Augusto Rancilio.

A few hours later, they hosted the four compositions created by the participants during four days of living together, listening, and recording. But Dozzy’s phrase also suggests something else: getting lost here is not just about orientation. It is about how one learns to read a place.

Villa Arconati does not represent a neutral backdrop for this first edition of the school conceived by Terraforma. The so-called Petite Versailles Italienne, an eighteenth-century example of a villa di delizia (villa of delight), was born as a space for representation and leisure, built to host parties, meetings, and forms of social life. Its French garden, the theater where Goldoni prepared his plays before staging them, the perspective illusions, and the labyrinth still form a landscape designed with extreme precision today. Those original symmetries remain legible, even though over the last few days they have been crisscrossed by circular white tents, portable recorders, LAPTOPs, and night walks in search of sounds.

From 2014 to 2022, Villa Arconati hosted the Terraforma festival, which was born right here to contribute to the redevelopment of a space in a severe state of neglect, before expanding into other geographies through the Terraforma Exo project. The return to Castellazzo happens today in a different and, indeed, radical form. Instead of the thousands of people who populated the festival, fifteen participants gathered for four days. Instead of a concert lineup, a path made of listening, immersion, field recording, manipulation, and spatial presentation.

The question that runs through the entire experience concerns sound as much as architecture: what does it mean to produce music in a place that already produces a multitude of sounds?

Ruggero Pietromarchi, founder of Threes and Terraforma, describes Radical School as a natural evolution of the relationship linking the project to Villa Arconati. The idea was to maintain some of Terraforma’s founding elements—the temporary community, the relationship with the landscape, the attention to the place—while shifting them toward an educational dimension. “Working on space, on the landscape, on a green architecture,” he says, “with sound as a catalyst element.”

The expression could not be more appropriate. In the park of Villa Arconati, the landscape acts as a compositional structure. The trees filter the wind, the vegetation absorbs frequencies, the fountains generate white noise, the insects dictate rhythms, and the distances build depth. The very act of wandering becomes part of the production process. Participants recorded day and night, inside the villa, in the campsite, along the park paths, and near the brook where frogs gathered. “Every noise we perceive is sound,” Dozzy observes.

Among the participants is Ilaria, who comes from an architecture background and sees this experience as an unprecedented form of mapping. Accustomed to observing and representing space, she found in sound a further layer of reading the landscape. “Working on something site-specific that exists here and only here” was one of the most significant aspects of the experience. Another came during the final soundcheck in the labyrinth, observing how sound could inhabit a built form and alter its perception.

Other participants come from classical music, electronic production closer to the dance floor, or different paths altogether. What struck them most was the freedom of the method, far from frontal teaching and closer to a practice of exploration. “This experience helped to listen differently to the sounds surrounding us,” one of them tells me. “Even silence itself becomes full of vibrations.”

While in the eighteenth century Villa Arconati was also a scenic machine intended for the representation of power, today it is temporarily reconfigured as a collective infrastructure for listening. The contrast between the monumentality of the villa and the almost nomadic character of the campsite is evident, but it generates no friction. Everything contributes to forming a temporary community that finds its common ground precisely in its attention to the landscape.

The four tracks presented during an event that shares the journey developed with Dozzy back to the public are born from environmental recordings later processed and manipulated. The croaking of frogs, for instance, is distributed through space via a circular diffusion system that gives the listener an almost physical presence of the animal. In other cases, doors, surfaces, and seemingly marginal noises are stretched out to generate new harmonies. Dozzy openly speaks of an “architectural process of sound,” made of layers, expansions, and relationships between different elements. “This is the beauty of working with recorded sounds of nature,” he explains.

When the compositions are finally broadcast among the hedges of the labyrinth, the boundary between recording and environment becomes uncertain. “Arconati has its own sound,” Dozzy says. Added to the materials produced during the residency are all those signals that continue to come from the park. For a few moments, it becomes difficult to distinguish what belongs to the composition from what pre-existed it.

This is probably the most interesting result of the first edition of Terraforma Radical School. Considering nature as an instrument, but also as architecture. Recognizing that a landscape already possesses its own sound form and that learning to listen to it can become, in turn, a form of design.